This book describes all the known ways in which the sounds of the world's languages differ. Encapsulating the work of two leading figures in the field, it will be a standard work of reference for researchers in phonetics, linguistics and speech science for many years to come. The scope of the book is truly global, with data drawn from nearly 400 languages, many of them investigated at first hand by the authors.

The authors are respectively Professor of Phonetics Emeritus and Adjunct Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Peter Ladefoged's books include the standard introductory phonetics textbook A Course in Phonetics 3e (Harcourt Brace, 1993)